Custom Paradise Group Exhibition

Installation & Performance Art

from: 25.10.2016 to: 30.10.2016

Organized in conjunction with the acclaimed Porn FilmFestival Berlin, now in its 11th year, SomoS Art House presents the “Custom Paradise” group exhibition: a collection of performative projects and ephemeral installations as critical responses to the notions of fantasy, image consumption, and the spectatorship and voyeurism of sexuality in mediated society.

This topic is partially inspired as a response to the recent resurgence in the popularity of virtual reality.

Two virtual reality artists, Michel Reilhac and Maria Guta, will present installations utilizing the technology to express their surreal fantasy-filled immersive environments, and visitors will have the chance to experience these artworks using multiple VR headsets.

Other participating artists and performers look behind and beyond the technical or technological aspect of virtual reality into a broader range of practices based upon a deep-seated desire to shape and define our own versions of reality or to create ways, places, or times in which we can escape from reality.

Artists and performers will address questions such as what it is that compels people to leave reality behind and enter a virtual reality? What would they like to find in this reality, or what is it that is missing in our shared reality? Why do people want to isolate themselves in their own private reality? How do we imagine our own paradise? Can we create it according to our private fantasy, according to our own intimate needs? Or can we enter one, that is offered to us, one that already exists? Can we negotiate or adapt our own paradise? Can it be a public paradise, a democratic one, open for all? Do we want to share it, let others in?

A group of artists and performers, as well as virtual reality filmmakers will respond to these questions through a series of performative installations over the course of five days. Sensorial experiences, interactivity vs performative isolation, and modified realities through immersion or dissociation, are topics that will be covered as we explore our instinct to create our own personal or custom paradises.

The exhibition at SomoS Art House in Berlin will take place from October 26th to October 30th, 2016, in conjunction with the 11th Porn FilmFestival Berlin.

On October 25th, 2016 from 6–9pm, all of the participating artists and performers will be present to engage audiences with a short version of their project. On each of the subsequent exhibition days, October 26th – 30th, 2016, one of these artists or performers will present their work daily.